Jesse Katz

Jesse Katz is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and the author of a memoir, The Opposite Field. A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he has earned numerous honors over a three-decade career, including two Pulitzer Prizes for spot news reporting (shared with the Times metro staff), the PEN Center USA award for literary journalism, and the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Jesse has taught literary journalism at the University of California, Irvine, and he has mentored incarcerated teenagers as a volunteer at California Youth Authority.

Gilberto Suarez, the Florida financier accused of smuggling Yasiel Puig out of Cuba in 2012, changed his plea from not guilty to guilty. In May, writer Jesse Katz revealed the details of Puig’s harrowing passage

Photograph by Sheryl Nields Bret Easton Ellis introduced me to the Polo Lounge in 1984, on a night of howling Santa Anas. We were on winter break from Bennington, the gradeless, testless college in Vermont that had made us both want to become writers. I was the neophyte, an exile from the Pacific Northwest, and […]

Photograph by Kharen Hill/Corbis Outline If Bryan Cranston were a Dodger—a notion not without appeal to him—he would be the consummate utility player, a grinder, a veteran of countless unsung assignments who finally gets his chance to deliver in the clutch and, just like that, captures the heart of the city. More, say, Mickey Hatcher […]

The Portland I grew up in—the Portland I left 28 years ago—was monochrome and dreary, a blue-collar river town that seemed lost in a perpetual drizzle. It still rains up there, but the home I once knew has been reborn a boutique city, indie, handcrafted, eclectic, even a bit voguish and refined. The tech boom […]

Photograph by Andrew Macpherson As I am led into the editing room at Apatow Productions, the unmarked, three-story West L.A. studio that is the Starship Enterprise of the comedy universe, I am greeted by a wall of video monitors that are playing, and replaying, a snippet of dialogue that sounds an awful lot like “dusty […]

So here on a misty bend of Highway 1 we shift gears—slowing long enough to pass the baton—before continuing on, to the bottom half of the state, to a shoreline more familiar and yet, to a remarkable degree, still authentic and untrammeled. Although this might be called the southern leg, I start on the Central […]